Press Releases

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Room4 and MBM Officially Signed Agreement to Introduce World Leading Digital Pathology Technologies to China

December 8, 2018, London/Oslo/Shanghai

Room4 and MBM officially signed agreement for Licensing and Technology transferring. MBM obtained exclusive commercial right of all Room4 diagnostic products and digital pathology technology platforms in Greater China, which represent leading digital pathology technologies developed in collaboration with the Institute for Cancer Genetics and Informatics (“ICGI”) Norway.

ICGI is a global leading institute on genetic and informatics medicine, involved in many cutting-edge research programs for cancer diagnosis and prognoses with wide collaboration with top international universities such as Oxford University and UCL etc. It is affiliated to Oslo University hospital, situated at the Norwegian Radium hospital. Room4 owns the exclusive commercial and IP rights to products licensed to MBM and developed in collaboration with ICGI.

The technologies and products related to this agreement include several advanced digital pathology software platforms, e.g. an automatic immuno-histochemistry(IHC) detection and scoring system (ImmunoPath), an automated Gleason scoring system (Pathtool), plus some promising cancer prognosis stratification technologies and other digital pathology technics for clinical or research purpose.

By acquiring these new products and technologies, MBM is enriching its portfolio and certainly be able to play a more active role in oncology and digital pathology area. Nucleotyping, the novel cancer prognostic marker included in the deal, is one of the latest research findings from ICGI. It classifies the tumor issues based on qualitative and quantitative analyses of DNA and chromatin structure in the tumor cell nuclei using advanced high-resolution digital image analysis, which will then provide objective and quantified prognostic stratification for a wide range of cancers including gynaecological cancers, prostate cancer and colorectal cancer. Articles on Nucleotyping were recently published on Lancet Oncology, as well as other top level peer reviewed journals.

Furthermore, MBM shows the ambition to develop its business strength in smart digital pathology area. The ImmunoPath software is one of the most advanced automated IHC detection and scoring system in the world. Also employing CNN deep leading technology. PathTool automated Gleason scoring software is a very powerful prostate cancer diagnosis tool, aimed at solving the issue of “3+4” vs “4+3” Gleason scoring challenge when manually reading. The lack of pathologists, time taken to train a qualified pathologist and subjective results varying by different operator have been and will be a continuing challenge in pathology field. There are huge demands from the market to apply AI in this area.

Jackson Zhu, Founder and CEO of MBM China, said: “Thanks to the long-term collaboration and good relationship with ICGI and Room4, we have got the chance to bring these world-class technologies to China. We definitely believe that “Digital” and “AI” are the right direction and solution for pathology. MBM will not only introduce these technologies to top hospitals, but also will make efforts on building regional smart digital pathology centers to enable the new technology to benefit more doctors and patients. A new era of smart digital pathology will be opening for us.”